View of Communication Process

Integrated marketing communications involves recognising the target audience and shaping a well- coordinated promotional program to draw out the desired audience response. Too frequently, marketing communications focus on overcoming instant awareness, image, or preference problems in the target market. But this particular approach to communication has limitations: It is too short term and too expensive, and most of the messages of this type fall on deaf ears. Nowadays, marketers are moving toward viewing communications like managing the customer relationship over time, during selling, pre-selling, consuming, and post consumption stages. Because customers differ, communications programs have to be developed for particular segments, niches, and even individuals. Given the new interactive communications technologies, companies ought to ask not only "How can we attain our customers?" but also "How can we discover ways to let our customers reach us?"

Thus, the communications process should start with an audit of all the potential contacts target customers can have with the company and its brands. For instance, someone purchasing a new computer can talk to others, read articles, see television ads and ads in and magazines and newspapers, visit many Web sites, and try out computers in one or more stores. The marketer has to assess the influence that each communications experiences will have at different stages of the buying procedure.

To effectively communicate, marketers have to understand how communication works. Communication involves the nine of these elements which shown in given figure. Two of elements are the main parties in a communication-the receiver and the sender. Another two are the main communication tools- the media and the message. Four more elements are major communication functions-decoding, encoding, response, and feedback. The last element is noise in the system.

1.   Sender: A party sending the message to another party.
2.   Encoding:  The procedure of putting thought into symbolic form.
3.   Message: The set of symbols which the sender transmits
4.   Media: A communication channels through which the message moves from sender to receiver
5.   Decoding: The procedure by which the receiver assigns meaning to the symbols encoded by the sender.
6.   Receiver: The party attaining the message sent by another party
7.   Response: After being exposed the reactions  of the receiver to the message-any of hundreds of probable responses
8.   Feedback: The part of the receiver's response communicated back to the sender

Noise: The unplanned distortion or static at the time of the communication process, which results in the receiver's getting a different message than the one the sender sent.

For a message to be effective, the sender's encoding procedure must mesh with the receiver's decoding procedure. Thus, the excellent messages consist of words and other symbols that are known to the receiver. The more the sender's field of experience overlaps along that of the receiver, the more effective the message is likely to be. Marketing communicators cannot always share their consumer's field of experience. For instance, an advertising copywriter from one social stratum may  create  ads  for  consumers  from  another  stratum-say,  blue-collar  workers  or  rich business owners. However, to communicate effectively, the marketing communicator has to understand the consumer's field of experience.

This model points out numerous key factors in good communication. Senders have to know what audiences they desire to reach and what responses they want. They have to be fine at encoding messages that take into account how the target audience decodes them. They ought to send messages through media that attain target audiences, and they have to develop feedback channels so that they may assess the audience's response to the message.